In the mid-1800s, a group of High Anglicans formed the Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA). Inspired by Dr. David Livingstone, they felt a special calling to bring the Church, education, and medical care to rural Africans. To deliver services across a huge, remote area, the UMCA relied on steamer ships that were sent from England and then reassembled on Lake Malawi. By the mid-1920s, the UMCA had built a chain of mission stations that spread across four hundred miles.

In The Steamer Parish, Charles M. Good Jr. traces the Mission's history and its lasting impact on public health care in south-central Africa-and shows how steam and medicine, together with theology, allowed the Mission to impose its will, indelibly, on hundreds of thousands of people. What's more, many of the issues he discusses-rural development, the ecological history of disease, and competition between western and traditional medicine-are as relevant today as they were 100 years ago.

List of IllustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsList of Abbreviations1. Christian Medical Missions and African Studies2. The Lake Malawi Region: Forces of Change in the Late Nineteenth Century3. The Return of the UMCA to Malawi: Technology and Political Relations in the Quest for Permanent Influence4. Expanding the Steamer Parish: Ten Thousand Square Miles for Mission5. Steamer Technology, Local Ecology, and Regional Economy6. Health in Sub-Saharan Africa and Malawi on the Eve of Colonization7. Medical Services for Missionaries and Africans8. Gauging Change: African Health and Well-being9. Treatment and Control: Limits and Contradictions of Science and Missionary Medicine10. The Rise and Fall of Missionary MedicineBibliographyIndex

Review Quotes

Robert Stevenson and Ken Mufuka | The Historian

“A goldmine for research scholars.”

Medical History

“Good’s elegant presentation unearths the tatters and the self-proclaimed glories of empire from the service history of a now dilapidated hulk. Generously embracing both the poignancy of an ill-starred enterprise, and the blinkered obstinacy contributing to its eventual obsolescence, Good elaborates a thematic agenda no historian of medical mission can well ignore.”

Giacomo Macola | Journal of African History

“Enlivened by numerous biographical profiles . . . and drawing upon a painstaking reading of archival records and missionary journals, The Steamer Parish makes an important contribution to our understanding of the origins of the contemporary crisis of public health care systems in Central Africa.”

Roy MacLeod | International History Review

“In an immensely attractive format, this splendid book offers us an unexpectedly profound insight into a specific form of a much wider phenomenon, the Protestant medical mission in sub-Saharan British Africa.”

Owen J.M. Kalinga | H-Net Reviews

“An important book, and an excellent addition to the historiography of this part of Africa.”

Stacey Langwick | International Journal of African Historical Studies

“The historically detailed account of the institutionalization of technological strategies for evangelism and imperialism will be of great use to students of African missions and African medical history, as will the evidence Good compiles on the landscape of biomedical diseases and services. Furthermore, by illustrating the way that technological histories played out in the ‘margins’ as particular objects moved from Europe to Africa, this book makes a valuable contribution to literature on technology and society.”

Pascal James Imperato | African Studies Review

“This splendidly written and meticulously researched volume presents a fascinating case study and critique of the medical activities of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa in Malawi over the eighty-year period from 1885 to 1964. . . The Steamer Parish represents historical medical geography at its finest. Charles Good not only carries his readers back to the issues of a long-ago era in Africa, but also casts them in the context of current relevance. As a result, his superbly crafted work will be of great value to many.”

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